Monday, June 16:
Violent downpours. Fidi has caught cold and is coughing; besides that, bad news of our poor little Putz-r. With every new creature arises a new wellspring of torment. We send the veterinary surgeon to Weidenberg and hope for an improvement.
I did not sleep well; worries about the children beset me. R. is somewhat better and works on his score. He is pleased with Fritzsch’s literary periodical, which contains a very good description of the Young Germany movement and the relationship between the literature it produced and true poetry.
R. talks about foreign words and the whole idea of literature, and says, “What we cannot express in our own language has no value for us.” He shows me J. Grimm’s Ancient Germanic Law, which he has now received and which he is glad to possess.
When I expatiate on the excellence of a person like J. G., who has so much feeling for the German identity, R. says he feels downright offended by the way Grimm is nowadays taken to task, just because of a few weaknesses he showed, as, for example, regarding the Celts.
Terrible news of the death by drowning of a child who went to school here, the only child of a man in Hof. Oh, God, all these ways of bringing about misery!
Herr Kietz is here again, to make a bust of R. In the evening we take up Ardinghello again, and I have to ask R. to stop reading, so angered and vexed am I by certain descriptions which I cannot consider to be Greek but, rather, French.